PAUL HENRY

Yesterday, Paul Henry resigned from his position as an the host of TVNZ’s Breakfast. And yet, it seems like just yesterday (indeed, it probably was) that Henry was riding the wave of success following his speech at the Qantas Media Awards. A controversial man, Henry has made a name for himself “expressing those things that we are all thinking”, but as many viewed, went one step too far with his comments about Sir Anand Satyanand and Commonwealth Games Coordinator, Sheila Dikshit. I spoke to him a few days before his infamous interview with Prime Minister John Key.

Can you describe a typical day in the life of Paul Henry? I.e. what time you have to get up and go into the office this morning?

A typical working day? Well, you get up and you’re tired; you go to work and you’re tired; you finish work, you’re tired and you go home exhausted. I get up at 4am and I have to get up as soon as I wake up, I am not one of those people, those ridiculous people who put their alarm clock on snooze and just lie there and draw out the nightmare of having to wake up. So yeah, I get up at 4 o’clock, I leave home just before 4.30am, get into work and look at the papers and read the programme and look at what I’m doing that day.

Do you continue to work for the rest of the day as well?

I have a few little interests of my own, but basically I like to get out of the building as soon as I possibly can.

Were you surprised by the overwhelming response to your speech at the Qantas media awards?

I suppose I didn’t really think about it. If I had thought about it I could have imagined that there would be an element of feedback based on the fact that I said the word, “Cunt”. It is quite unusual, to hear that word in the public forum.

Why use that letter in particular?

I thought it was so incredibly funny and I get letters like that pretty often, but that was at the extreme end. It was so funny to think of someone sitting in their house or squalid little campervan penning that down on a piece of paper and imagining… did they get a huge amount of satisfaction buying a stamp and sending that off I don’t know

I’m surprised that they haven’t come out of the woodwork to be honest?

Well, they would be pissed off wouldn’t they? Because it had exactly the wrong result. I mean obviously, they were intending to offend me and clearly, they just entertained me. They were intending to imply that I was an appalling broadcaster and yet, I used it to the opposite end and got kudos from it. So, I think they would be highly pissed off and they would know that most of the people laughing were actually laughing at them.

Who will you vote for in the Super city mayoralty race?

John Banks for Mayor because he is not a socialist and he has a proven track record. I am not voting for him because he is the best person to be mayor, I am voting for him because he is the best person out of those who have stood.

What are the issues that you personally are most concerned about?

You know when it comes to local body politics; the important issues are providing a safe, affordable, quality environment for the ratepayers. Too many Councils get too bogged down with creating bloody empires and making their empires even bigger. By that I don’t just mean big bureaucracies that don’t service anybody, I mean things like parks and recreation facilities. It is all very well to say, “Oh, we need a bigger library or we need some more parks, or oh, there’s a spare bit of land, let’s use that to plant some trees, it will look nice.”

At the end of the day, if the people in the area can’t afford it, then you shouldn’t be doing it. If they are already struggling to pay their rates, why burden them with another couple of acres of trees? You know what I mean? It is better to have sensible town planning so that you make sure that the person who does buy into private enterprise makes a nice job of putting it together and making it a workable space. I am not interested in councils that are just interested in bureaucracies and some legacy to hand on, some future burden for ratepayers. At the end of the day, you have got water; you have got sewerage and footpaths.

Would you ever consider taking this political knowledge and running for Parliament again?

No, not again. I have given it a go. I have had a few opportunities actually, a couple of parties have indicated that they would like me to have me stand and have offered me very safe seats in the last election and the one before. No I have given it a go and I am certainly not interested in becoming a list MP. It is not something that you ever say, that’s it, I will never do it, but I can say that I have been offered some very safe seats and have turned them down.

May I ask which parties or which seats?

You can probably imagine. I don’t know if I suffer falls gladly enough to be in politics, particularly now my ability now to suffer falls, which was never really high, has reduced further.

You started out working with Sir David Attenborough, do you still keep in touch?

No, I never even kept in touch with him then. When I say that I worked with him I was in a very junior capacity and he was quite often shooting overseas and things like that. Even though I worked with him and I was working with him on a daily basis, most of the time I was working with what he was sending back from the field. The actual amount of time I spent with him was not very significant.

Over the course of your career, you have also travelled around the world reporting on world events, famines and disparate situations; do you have any ambitions to go back to that type of reporting?

No, no. Sometimes, I watch it and I very briefly think, God, I would like to be there and I would like to do it that way and it should be shot like and if I was there I would be doing that. But I would never go and do it because it was a phase I went through in my life, it was brilliant doing it and I was good at it. But you know – you are living in horrible, horrible conditions. It wasn’t the danger that particularly bothered me; it was the lack of plumbing. You know the lack of sanitation. You are sleeping in the jungle and you are wet and dirty and you can’t go to the toilet and at the end of the day, my threshold for that has reduced dramatically.

In saying that, which conflicts or current political situations have captured your attention recently?

To be honest, I have always had a fascination with Africa and if you like conflicts and situations, it is nice to have a fascination with Africa because they always have conflicts on the go. So my interest moves up a notch when I read or hear something about a situation in one of the areas.

Obviously, you maintain an active interest in those conflicts that Every Horizons is interested in, what are the main achievements of that organization?

To be honest I don’t really talk about that. I have had people offer me money and say I will help you out with that and if you are not careful, you just become another aid organization. See if you take someone else’s money to do something with, you have to be accountable and also at any time, that person can say, “What did you do with my money?” It actually costs quite a lot of money to be accountable, whereas if you use your own money, you don’t have to be accountable. I know on any given day – how many kids I have given to today who will benefit from projects that I have paid for and even though they will always be very, very small, I know basically every dollar I give and what’s happening to it. It is actually doing something. I did originally have the idea of taking money from other people and making sure it was spent well, but it became very obvious to me early on that it is easier to spend your own money than to spend other peoples.

What projects you are working on at the moment?

I have projects in Cambodia; most of the projects are in Africa. But outside of Africa, Cambodia is the only one I have invested significant amounts of money in.

Why Cambodia?

Just because I visited there a few times and what I look at, what I look for is I look for are things I can spend money on or invest in or buy that will make a huge, huge difference for the amount of money they will cost, but won’t require any constant involvement. I don’t want to give exact examples, but if you can imagine going into a place that is functioning and say, if I were to leave with you today 2000 books, those books would continue to be useful for twenty years. So I never have to go back, they’re there. I know they were delivered, I know they were given out; the money that has been spent has been spent well and continues to trickle on for twenty years. So that’s the sort of thing that I like to do. So if I see something overseas or if someone presents me with an idea, and in Africa, there are many, many things like that as long as you can avoid bureaucracies and things like that, there are many, many things you can do that fit into that category.

You told Jim Morar recently that you don’t read many books, is this the plight of the modern man or do you just not enjoy them?

I get bored very, very easily. The question is what you are interested in and I am interested in facts. You don’t need to write 40,000 words to get some facts across, 3000 is fine so I read a huge amount, but I don’t start a book and finish it. I read, I like feature writing, I like reading papers, but to actually sit down and read an entire book, I just don’t have a threshold for it.

What are your plans for 2011?

I am thinking about that now, you don’t want to get stuck in a rut do you?